My group’s first play ran a genuinely absurd eight hours, which the box’s advertised forty minutes per player did not remotely prepare us for, and I’ll admit some of that was our own fault, fumbling through rules we hadn’t pre read closely enough. Second and third plays dropped much closer to the advertised time once the actions stopped requiring a rulebook check every turn, and the actions themselves really are straightforward, I never needed to flip back to the reference sheet after that first session.

Where this earns its reputation over a lot of the point salad euros crowding this space is the theme integration, contact with alien life actually shifts the entire game state rather than sitting decoratively in the corner, new scoring paths unlock, the board itself has a section that physically rotates as the game progresses, a detail I didn’t expect to care about and now genuinely look forward to each play. Two player runs a little light on tension in my experience, not enough competition for the scanning locations to create real friction, three felt like the sweet spot, four risks the game overstaying its welcome given the length.

The honest criticism, and I’ve seen other people land here too, is that once you get past the alien discovery moments the engine underneath is still just another way to convert cards into points, the theme is doing more emotional labor than mechanical labor. I don’t think that sinks it. The setup is real, box organization takes some getting used to, and I’d steer a first time buyer toward watching a rules video before their first session rather than reading the book cold, but once it’s rolling this delivers exactly the kind of tight, thinky resource puzzle I keep coming back to this hobby for.